A Mechanistic Approach to Plankton Ecology

By T. Kiørboe. 2008

377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Our limited intuition of the small-scale world of the plankton has biased the way we describe and understand ocean ecology. Classical approaches consider fluxes of energy and matter between species and populations to describe marine ecosystems but biological interactions occur between individuals rather than between the abstract entities of ‘populations’ or “trophic levels.” A complementary approach is to derive system properties from mechanistic insights in individual functioning and interactions. Plankton live in a world that is radically different from ours, and to which we have limited access. Visualization is central to developing an intuition for this world, which together with insights in small-scale fluid physics may allow a mechanistic understanding of individual interactions and deduction of properties of populations and ecosystems. This lecture demonstrates the mechanistic approach through a number of examples, including numerous videos.

Subfields: Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ccfe50ba82fe0b46a004bc5c18fa760a05461aa8

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In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

Diet of worms emended: an update of polychaete feeding guilds. (2015, background): “Substantial advances have been made since F&J in linking mechano- and chemosensory abilities of planktonic organisms (Kiørboe 2008) and benthic decapods (Weissburg & Zimmer-Faust 1993, Koehl et al. 2001) with feeding biology.”
A size‐structured food‐web model for the global ocean (2012, background): “The resultant grazing preference (wjpred, jprey ) thus has a log-normal distribution, which is centered on a predator : prey length ratio of 10 (Kiørboe 2008).”
Modelling spatial and temporal patterns in size-structured marine plankton communities: top -down and bottom -up controls (2014, background): “This is slightly narrower than some empirical estimates (Kiørboe, 2008), but it should be noted that the model does not include other potentially important density-dependent loss processes, such as viral lysis (Suttle, 1994; Thingstad, 2000) and aggregation mediated sinking (Burd and Jackson, 2008).”
Interactions between microplastics and phytoplankton aggregates: Impact on their respective fates (2015, background): “First, increase of aggregate permeability enhance encountering between small particles and aggregates as the small particles are not moved away from the aggregate by Brownian motions but can go through aggregates macropores and be captured (Xiao et al., 2012; Kiørboe, 2008).”
Active prey selection in two pelagic copepods feeding on potentially toxic and non-toxic dinoflagellates (2009, background): “Prey selection may be passive; that is, clearance rates on different prey species in a mixture can be predicted from clearance rates measured in single-prey incubations (Kiørboe, 2008).”
The chemical ecology of copepods (2014, background): “Q ¼ 4pDCL ð2Þ Assuming a diffusion coefficient (D) of 1025 cm2 s21, a trail length of 10 cm and sensitivity threshold in the range of 1028–10211 M (Yen et al., 1998; Kiørboe, 2008a; Yen and Lasley, 2010) lead to an estimated pheromone release rate on the order of Q 10214–10217 mol s21 (Snell and Car”
Maximal feeding with active prey-switching: A kill-the-winner functional response and its effect on global diversity and biogeography (2014, positive): “Active prey-switching is a predatory behavior that has been documented in natural ecosystems (Murdoch, 1969, 1975; Hughes and Croy, 1993; Kiørboe et al., 1996; Gismervik and Andersen, 1997; Elliott, 2006; Kempf et al., 2008; Kiørboe, 2008; Kalinkat et al., 2011) and is known to stabilize ecosystem d”
Dimensions of marine phytoplankton diversity (2019, methodology): “6 to 2425 μm) that graze on plankton (phyto- or zoo-) 5 to 20 times smaller than themselves, but preferentially 10 times smaller (Hansen et al., 1997; Kiorboe, 2008; Schartau et al., 2010).”
Ocean acidification enhances the growth rate of larger diatoms (2014, background): “…of 1022 cm2 s23 indicate that cells less than 200 mm in diameter do not experience turbulent mixing in their immediate environment, and the enhancement of the transport of solutes, such as CO2, to the cell surface relative to diffusion is very minor (Wolf-Gladrow and Riebesell 1997; Kiørboe 2008).”
Trait-based approaches to zooplankton communities (2013, background): “The gelatinous plankton (cnidarians, ctenophores, tunicates) are generally broadcast spawners, while all other taxa with sexual reproduction appear to have mating.”
Biophysical interactions in the plankton: A cross‐scale review (2012, background): “[4] Considerable progress in the study of biophysical interactions in plankton has been made at the microscale—the scale of centimeters and less—where individual plankton interact with each other and with their environment (Kiørboe 2008).”
Zooplankton body composition (2013, background): “…groups, as documented for protozoans (Menden-Deuer and Lessard 2000) as well as for some phytoplankton (Strathmann 1967), and such size-dependent variation likewise has implications for nutrient acquisition (Thingstad et al. 2005) and other aspects of the organism’s ecology (Kiørboe 2008).”
Understanding the responses of ocean biota to a complex matrix of cumulative anthropogenic change (2012, background): “…theory might be built around the physicochemical constraints that impose as to how far cell physiology (for example diffusion rates of nutrients, Kiørboe 2008), phytoplankton functional traits (Litchman et al. 2012) or cell biochemistry (Makarieva et al. 2008) can be altered by a complex matrix…”
On the roles of cell size and trophic strategy in North Atlantic diatom and dinoflagellate communities (2013, background): “A similar seasonal size shift has been observed in temperate coastal waters and is consistent with theoretical predictions about how maximum cell size should decrease with declining nutrient concentration (Kiørboe 2008).”
Vertical salmon lice behaviour as a response to environmental conditions and its influence on regional dispersion in a fjord system (2014, background): “Swimming activity might affect mortality both through energy spent on the swimming and as the salmon louse makes itself more exposed to predation from ambush invertebrate predators through hydromechanical signals (Kiørboe 2008).”